You’re drawn to working on your own because you want to do it your way.  You don’t want a boss. You hate punching a clock, asking permission to do stuff, going to meetings, trusting your fate to some company.

You’d rather run your own life, and not be blown around by someone else’s winds.

Yeah, me too.

But there’s flip side to all that sweet autonomy. It hit me sharply about three days after I went freelance.

All my excuses were suddenly null and void.

Once I took the rudder, I couldn’t blame a bone-brained boss, or crotchety company policy or a damn re-org for my troubles.

I realized that when you have virtually complete say over who, what, where, how and when, griping and whining get you no sympathy points whatever.

Worse yet, the only thing that bitching does is instantly give you a list of stuff you have to fix, start doing, or stop doing.  (Which is, when you’re hoping for a little sympathy, is irritating in the extreme.)

On the other side of your gripe is your game plan.

For me, the internal chatter goes something like this. (Oddly, the other voice sounds like that hard-chinned English teacher of mine from high school, the one who brooked no bullshit in her class whatever.)

“Oh, the economy sucks right now. Nobody has any budgets.”

Really?  Nobody?  How many clients said they had no money?  Three hundred and twelve?  Every company east of Pittsburgh? You can’t find three, four or five clients who have some money? Look for companies who are used to paying twice what you charge. Then offer them brilliance for 20% less.

Better yet, why can’t you offer something amazing they will find the budget for?  Um, . . . I don’t know, try something.

“Clients just don’t value this work. They just want cheap and fast.”

So?  Are you chained to these pinchpennies?  Find clients who thrive on really good work. Start with companies who have dazzlingly good web sites, brilliant content, irresistible product photography. Contact them.  Find agencies, marketing firms, web developers who are doing amazing stuff. Attract them.  Or, duh, find out what clients will pay big money for.

“Everybody takes so long to pay.”

Then don’t work for laggards. From now on, get half the money in advance.  Make them commit, up front, in writing, when they will pay. If you must wait for your money, double your rates.  At least you’ll be waiting for a bigger check, no?

“There are too many people doing [ insert trade here ]. And they’re all working for peanuts.”

So don’t be ‘just another’ [ insert trade here ].  Be something entirely different.  Nine times more appealing, smarter, more distinctive. Offer something they don’t. Or can’t. Or won’t. Specialize in something insanely narrow, like menus for noodle shops, copy for people who hate to read, black-and-white logos, one-page web sites.  And really, if you can be outdone by someone who works for eleven dollars, you’re doing it wrong.

“I’m no good at promoting myself.”

Then stop promoting, hawking and marketing yourself like an ass.  Instead, engage some people, one on one.  Send a human-to-human email (or even a handwritten note) to three new people every day for a month. And make it about them.  Don’t yammer about yourself.

While you’re doing that, make your current clients feel so damn excited that they can’t help but tell nine other people about you.

Put something on your web site that is so stunningly different that it scares you. Do some work for small local charity that has a crappy web site with god-awful content. Do something.

“Some days I just can’t stand the work.”

Would you rather be twenty feet up a ladder, sizzling in the sun, scraping fifty years of paint off an old house?  Remember that?  Or driving to your cubicle job with an awful twist in your guts because you’re about to get chewed out?  Remember that?

Yes, I remember. Never mind.

What if you needed to ratchet up your income, by oh, 43% or so? And pretty soon.

Or what if you’re tired of scratching around with pipsqueak projects for D-list clients. You want to do work that means something, for clients with actual budgets?

What should you focus on? What do you ramp up?

Your skills? Networking? Productivity?

No. That’s the wrong end of the stick.

If you’re looking to bust out of the minor leagues, crank up your confidence.

Stoke your hubris, arrogance, audacity, nerve, your utterly uncrackable belief in your own infallibility. Cultivate some balls. From what I’ve seen (and experienced) it is the difference between the huddled masses and the elite.

At any given level of skill, the freelancer with the bigger stones, the clanking cast-iron confidence will always command higher fees, work the classier projects, win the juicier clients.

And, ergo, make more money. Twice and thrice over.

(And interestingly, do better work, too.)

Think of guts as a multiplier of skill. Call it the stones factor.

The math of brass

Extreme example:

There are maybe 913 people out there who can design as well, or better, than Peter Arnell. But I bet Arnell out-earns every one of them. Some by a factor of nine.

Okay, maybe Arnell is considered pompous and irritating. (More about that in a second.) And maybe his reputation took a dent with that Tropicana carton and the new Pepsi logo. But, irritating or not, he persuaded clients to hire him for a few million, quite a few times. (I haven’t managed that yet.) And dollars against donuts, Arnell will do so again.

Down here in the trenches, guts and confidence work exactly the same way. The mediocre, talent-free writer who’s convinced she’s a genius will run rings around the mediocre, talent-free writer who’s hiding under her desk.

It fixes a lot

When you’re working with full-on confidence, all the other productivity/networking/self-management stuff takes care of itself. You automatically do what you should be doing.

You produce like crazy, because as you sit down to work, you just know you’re about to create something amazing, and you can’t wait to see what it is. There is no dicking around and twittering and hand-wringing. You bust your chops, and like it. The process feels good.

And if clients send your stuff back marked “WTF?”, you just shrug and come up with something even better. You know there’s a box full of gems in the drawer.

When you’re feeling invincible, you quote higher fees, because that’s what dazzling work costs, after all. And if they say ‘no’, well, they just can’t afford you.

And you network in fourth gear, a few notches above your head, because you know you can play up there with the big guns. You know their pencils aren’t any sharper than yours.

The ‘But’

Huge caveat here.

That carbide-tipped confidence works best when you keep it under your coat. Don’t walk around with your hubris sticking out.

Sure, clients expect self-assurance in a freelancer. Clients want to feel you know what you’re doing, that you will solve the problem, deliver the goods. Exuding competence is good. Dripping with arrogance and ego, no.

In public, in front of the client, it’s far smarter to be understated and modest.

One of the most effective ‘sales’ guys I ever worked with, a video producer, had an uncanny knack for holding back a bit in client presentations. He acted as if he were just itching to say ‘This is going to be freaking brilliant‘, but kept it under wraps.

The effect was much like pressing your thumb over the end of a garden hose, rather than letting it gush. Pent-up energy. Clients always caught that vibe.

You can think you’re brilliant all you want.  Just don’t let it out.

That’s where Arnell blows it.

Okay, so how do you get confident?

Ah.  Isn’t this a chicken-and-egg thing?

How are you supposed to be confident when you’re working scared, with a two-digit bank account and belly full of doubt? What if the business has been boxing your ears for months on end? And clients haven’t liked a thing you’ve done since September?

Been there. Plenty of times. No magic answers, sorry.

But a couple of ridiculously simple things seem to help, though.

I heard an interview once with a morning radio DJ. I’ve long forgotten who. The question was, “How do you sound so damn happy and funny every day? What about those days when everything sucks, when you’re fighting with your wife, when you have a skull-cracking headache? How do you go on air and kid around?”

“Simple,” the guy said. “I just act as if I were having a blast. I step into the persona of a guy who’s just bustin’ out happy, and do exactly what that guy would do, even if I don’t feel it. And you know, after about 15 minutes, I actually am damn happy.”

Oddly, merely acting as if you were confident sometimes works the same way. What would the gutsiest, most self-assured person in the business do right here, right now? Call that client back? Sit down to work and kick some ass?

Conjure up a James Bond character, and play that role for a bit. How would you sound on the phone? How much would that guy quote? Fake it for now. Pretend. Act as if.

(When you think about it, being confident isn’t really the point. It’s the doing that counts. /End of profundity.)

A designer I know digs out some past work to get her juice back. When clients pound her confidence flat, she immerses herself in her private portfolio for a while, to remind herself that she really does have it, dammit.

Me, I’ve been known to re-read some old glory, too, to remind myself that I only pulled that work off because I quit being a chicken.  I just dove in and did it.

The stones factor.

Do you remember the first day on your own?

The day you stepped onto that swaying, shaking rope bridge over the chasm, without a job, in charge of your own fate?

Here’s what I remember.

I had set up an office in the basement. My desk was a folding table.  I had a stack of yellow pads.  A dozen Ticonderoga pencils in cleaned-out soup can.  Cheap-ass business cards. My phone (a low-cost ‘teen line’ as they called it back then) was connected by a wire that hung down from the ceiling.  A typewriter (Yes, that’s how freaking long ago this was) on the table.  A fresh new ribbon.

Behind me, the furnace chuffed.  The hot water heater came on now and then.

In front of me, the cinder block walls, weeping a little wet as always.

Upstairs, right above my head, I could hear my daughter, maybe 14 months old, padding around in her non-skid foot pajamas.  Playing around with pots and pans and her dollies, like all was well.

I could hear my wife, upstairs, too, following her around.

My wife and my girl upstairs.

Me, downstairs at a folding table.

I was never so scared in my life.

And your first day?  What was it like?

How good must you be to freelance successfully?

Do you need to be a rock star genius in your craft?

Nah. Being a genius may be useful. But it’s not a requirement. Heck, just fancying yourself a genius is sometimes enough. (I’ve gotten by on that for years.)

And yes, as I’ve said, having a double dose of clanking, cast-iron confidence

(balls) is worth its weight in brass nine times over. It is the difference between the minor leaguers and the elite.

But even if you’re the self-doubting sort with only basic skills in your backpack, you can do okay.

If you are competent enough to survive in a staff job, even a job buried in the southern hemisphere of the org chart, you’re good enough to survive as freelancer.

Don’t count on getting rich just yet, but you can earn enough to eat. As long as you get a few core things right.

Plod

There’s a marketing writer whose work I bump into every now and then. His work, in my haughty, writerly opinion, is two notches below plain vanilla, uninspired and lifeless.

Nevertheless, the guy appears to be working steadily. How much he makes, I really don’t know. But he has clients who like him. People call him back over and over again.

Every month or two he sends out a client newsletter, which in my haughty, writerly opinion, just recycles rusty old cliches about ‘getting attention’, ‘talking benefits, not features.’

But that clunky newsletter is apparently enough to keep his blip on clients’ radar.

From what I hear, this chap is known for always delivering his work on time. If he promises copy by noon, that Word file comes dinging into the inbox at noon, by gum. (He’s one up on me there.)

His prose may be limp and perfunctory, but it dutifully covers all the required points and is proofed and spell-checked and arrives at precisely 12 o’clock.

Maybe the guy is suffocating under the weight of unpaid bills. Maybe his spouse is all over his ass about getting a real job. I have no idea. That isn’t the point.

The guy is working. He ain’t jetting to the Caymans for the weekend. But he’s his own boss (except maybe for that spouse.)

He has found away to wring an income from the ability he has.

Be nice

A producer friend tells me about a freelance voice-over guy who does narration for corporate videos, on-air promos and the occasional radio or TV commercial.

As a voice talent, the guy is considered strictly mid-list. No distinctive voice, no compelling persona. His readings are adequate but unremarkable, and he often requires too many takes.

Ordinarily, producers would toss his demo reel in the drawer with the 193 others.

Except this guy is an Olympic-class thank-you and follow-up artist.

About a year ago I happened to sit in on a recording session where he was doing the voice-over for a corporate video I had scripted.  I was there only to help with technical terms and acronyms in the narration.  (It’s ‘EEthernet.’  Not etherNET.  It’s S-A-P, not sap.)

Three hours after the session, I get an email from the guy thanking me for all my expert and gracious help in navigating the complexities of the technical language and, by the way, the script read like a dream and had more juice than most of the stuff he reads and he would enjoy working with my narration any time.

Yep, a bit over-syrupy (except for the part about how brilliant my script was.) But the email registered in my consciousness.

The same day, the producer got his own thank-you email, as did the production assistant, the client (who wasn’t even there) and I suspect even the kid who brought in coffees from the deli during the session.

As the producer told me, I could also expect a handwritten thank-you note by mail in a few days, followed by another mail in a week saying, oh, that he ran into another client who knew me and thought me impossibly talented, too.

And around the 18th of every month — for at least a year — I got another email or note with some sort of deft reference to my skill or that last script or something. And the guy knew full well I never even hire voice-over talent.

How much time he spends writing notes and following up with people, and remembering daughters’ names, I can’t say. Perhaps more time than he spends recording voice-overs.

But as I’ve heard around the business, the guy gets called in — at least on the margins, for non-critical jobs — just because he’s so freaking nice. And diligent. And polite.  And he never lets anyone forget him. And he earnestly tries to please.

Guilting people out is not the ideal business model, but it sort of works.  It’s what this guy can do.

If anyone should ask me, this second, off the top of my head, if I knew of a narrator, I’d have to mention this guy. Maybe I’d be obligated to say ‘He’s no superstar’, but he’s okay.’

But I’d know his name.

Think of it this way.

In a cubicle job 100% of your income — the money you need for your family — comes from a single source.  The boss has 100% control over 100% of your income.  (Personally, that would scare the hell out of me.) If the job goes away, even through no fault of your own, 100% of your family’s income disappears instantly.

Too many bucks in one basket.

As a freelancer, no single company, department, or boss has 100% control over your income.  Your living money comes from three, seven, nine, or twelve different sources.  It is highly unlikely that 100% of your income could disappear in one stroke. I would have to screw up in biblical proportions to irritate twelve different clients at the same time.  Income from multiple sources begets more security, in my book.

Freelancing gives you a more diversified income portfolio.

Is entrepreneurship somehow a more worthy calling than freelancing?

Some people think so. I disagree.

True, in some circles, the ‘entrepreneur’ carries many more status
points. The enterpreneur is the capitalist hero. He is Andrew Carnegie,
Michael Dell, and the guys who invented Google. The kids who sold
YouTube for a few billion.

The freelancer, in that view, is a migrant laborer.

Here is marketing guru Seth Godin in a blog post on funding:

“Most companies are not appropriate sites for VC
[venture capital] money. That’s because they’re freelance ventures, not
entrepreneurial ones. A freelance venture is one where you work to get
paid. An entrepreneurial one is where you can make money while you
sleep. . .”

And here is Paul Knapp in “How not to get rich” on membox.

“The worst business to be in is one where you sell your
time. Selling your time is a terrible way to get rich. Sure, you might
get a good income, and slowly build up some savings and financial
assets. But really, any business that relies on its owner selling their
[sic] time is just a job.”

Godin and Knapp are right. If you long for vast riches and status, go
build a company and sell it for a many millions.  You can earn money as
you sleep.  (Although I doubt that entrepreneurs get much sleep.)

As one-time entrepreneur Paul Graham puts it, you will have solved the money problem forever, in one fell swoop. You will have achieved the holy grail of entrepreneurdom.

But I’m not sure freelancers think that way. At least not this
freelancer, nor the freelancers that I mingle with.  We’re not so moved
to build and run a company.  It would involve putting up with way more crap than we could stand.

We do, however, like the idea of solving the lifetime money issue in
one master stroke. But we think of doing it the way J.K. Rowling, the
creator of Harry Potter, did it. We like the way Pablo Picasso did it.

Did Ansel Adams dream of setting up a chain of photo studios in strip malls?  I think he just wanted to take pictures.

Mark Twain made a ton of money writing books.  Then quickly lost most
of it on a start-up venture peddling a typesetting machine.  He had to
write and talk his way back to solvency.

However, it is smart to think about side projects, where you create
properties, libraries of work, tools, designs, concepts, or content
that can earn you money over and over again.  You don’t need a company
to put out a CD or write a book or design a portfolio of web page
templates.

Think of it as taking an entreprenuerial approach to your craft.  Like freelancing for yourself.

Are freelancers just small-scale entrepreneurs?

Not really.

Are entrepreneurs just mega-freelancers?

No.

Freelancers and entrepreneurs are separate species.  They are wired differently.  I know plenty of freelancers and quite a few entrepreneurs, and like them both.  But they seek different satisfactions, have different heroes, and have different daydreams.

The main point of commonality:  neither can work for anyone else.
Freelancers and entreprenuers are boss-intolerant and genetically
independent.  They don’t apply for jobs.

But other than that, freelancers and entrepreneurs see through
different lenses.  One would be hopelessly bored or irritated trying to
be the other.  And mostly, they don’t want to be the other.

The sweeping generalizations:

Freelancers identify with their crafts, their skills, their work.
“I’m a photographer.  I’m a web designer.  I’m a programmer.  I
sculpt.”  Entrepreneurs identify with an industry.  “I’m in real
estate.  I’m in e-commerce.  I’m in restaurants.”

Ask a freelance what she’s good at, she’ll say  line drawings, or
lifestyle reporting, designing interiors, or developing menus.   Ask an
entreprenuer, and he’ll hesitate a bit, and say, “I’m good at putting
the right people together” or “I’m good at making it happen.”  “I have
an eye for opportunities.”

Freelancers dream about getting better.  Designers want to create
posters that give people goosebumps.  Ad writers want to win awards.
Programmers want to be sought-after as the best coder on the planet.

But entrepreneurs think about getting bigger.  If they succeed with
one discount flooring store, they want to build ninety-four of them.
They keep score by size and scale.  Only an entrepreneur could admire a
Wal-Mart.

When a freelancer says he made something, he means he literally
made with his own hands, his mouse, or his pottery wheel. When an
entreprenuer says he built something, he actually paid other people to
build it for him.  The way a producer ‘makes’ a movie by hiring people
to make a movie for him.

I have worked alongside (and for) entrepreneurs.  They mostly spend
their days talking to people, on the phone, settling fights, putting
out fires, making decisions, hoping for good news, and yelling at
people.  They are good in chaos.  Doing 143 different things in one day
energizes them.  Many tend toward ADHD, I think.

Is entrepreneuring a hard job?  Yes.  Does it require rare skills and
uncommon starch?  Yes.  Is it satisfying when it comes off?  Sure.

But you’re not making a movie.  You’re paying other people to make a movie.

Which, to me, isn’t nearly as satisfying.

What should you stock in your tool box?

You’ll need optimism.  You must believe things will work out.

You need confidence.  Two sets of that, plus a spare.  And a back-up.  You can’t work scared.  Clients will sense it and be uneasy.  Confidence will trump almost anything.

You also need your skill.  Whether that is drawing, making photographs, carving, designing, organizing, accounting, making people like you, or writing code.  Keep it well honed, oiled, and fully charged.

Everything else is secondary.

When my grandfather worked as a tool and die maker in the ’40s and ’50s, he was expected to supply some of his own tools. He brought along an oak tool chest packed with his dies, taps, mill files, micrometers, bits, gauges and other specialties of his trade gathered over the years.

Having your own gear made it easier to find work.  Machine shop foremen saw you as a solid pro, a guy they could hire and not worry about.  And for my grandfather, who went shoeless in the Depression, steady work was the holy grail.

His tool chest sits on my desk right now.  It is permanently smudged with shop grit and embedded machine oil.  In the drawers are the tools of my trade.  One stapler.  Thirty bulldog clips, a nine-year supply of paperclips, USB cables, pencil stubs, an extra mouse, linty post-it notes, 94 business cards.  My Mac OSX CDs.  Microsoft Word.  Strunk and White.

There’s also a small card my grandfather left in the chest maybe 40 years ago.  A note to penciled to himself, in Russian.  I have no idea if it’s a to-do list, cheat sheet, or driving directions.  But I’m saving it just in case.

I keep the chest for continuity, so I can say its still in the family and still serving an honest trade.  (Although my grandfather never quite understood what I did for a living.  “So who reads what you write?”  “Nobody, really,” I said, “It’s only ad copy.”)

I like having the tool chest here.  Makes me feel workmanlike.  Like a pro getting a day’s work done.

It’s where I keep my optimism, and two sets of confidence.

Do you have to be big to thrive?

Nope.

Hugh McCleod is a freelancer of sorts who writes a blog called Gaping Void that seems to be about blogging about blogging about blogs.  In his archives is this mini-profile of a fellow who makes his own way by vending coffee near a train station in Northern England.

Says Hugh:

“It’s a story about a regular guy who managed to find a simple, sustainable level of personal sovereignty in a small town in Northern England.”

The gurus dub this ‘micropreneuring’ or ‘solopreneuring,’ which is just a whisker away from freelancing.

It’s a small truck, but he’s the one who’s driving.

How much can you realistically earn as a freelancer?

The short answer is: “As much as you want to earn.”

That sounds smartass, but it’s as close to the truth as I’ve found. Virtually all the freelancers I know end up making precisely what they want to earn. Period.

The key word is “want.” (Not hope for, or fantasize about, or wish for, but want, deep in your bones.)

There may be  technical and economic realities at work in your profession, but their effect will be puny compared to your desire. You can override all sorts of “realities” when the itch is bad enough.

When things cool off, you turn up the heat

It all seems to be governed by an ‘income thermostat’ in the brain circuitry. Let’s say your thermostat is set on $100K a year. Which means, to you, making anything less would be unthinkable, intolerable or impractical. Or unacceptable to your spouse.

When you’re set on $100K, the sensors in your gut will continually monitor your income by whatever metrics you’ve chosen.

Maybe the metric is the money owed to you. Maybe it’s the number of works in progress, or how many weeks you are booked. For me, it seems to be the number of assignments on my desk. For you, it might be money in your checking account, or the number of invoices you send out on Fridays.

Whenever your gut senses that your income is slipping below $100K you will instinctively and subconsciously turn up the heat. You throttle up. You call people back sooner, send out quotes or estimates faster. Or you will reflexively raise your fees (or lower them, in the hope of attracting more work.) You start calling people, sending e-mails, working your network.

You may find inspiration strikes. You work faster. Frederick Handel, as the story goes, composed his famous “Messiah” in a mere 24 days because he was dreadfully short of cash.

Your burners will stay lit until you sense you are back on the $100 K pace.

At which point, you will reflexively and subconsciously back off a bit. Never mind returning every phone call or e-mail within the hour. Tomorrow is fine. You may blow off assignments that seem dull and small. You may coast through the afternoon and knock off early.

Whenever I take a juicy check to the bank, my productivity sags for a day or two. (Or longer, depending on how fat the check was.) I find it hard to nail myself to the desk when the bank account is bulging.

“Bulging”, of course, is a relative term . I have one laid back friend whose notion of ‘bulging’ wouldn’t fill my cookie jar. I also have a hard-driving neighbor who doesn’t ease up until the timbers in his attic creak under the weight of gold. I look like a slacker by comparison.

The same dynamic is at work in salaried folk. Which is why you see people continually angling and finagling their way up the organization; their thermostats are set on CFO level salaries and perks. So they instinctively fidget and maneuver till they hit the number.

What determines your thermostat setting?

Most new freelancers seem to shoot for the income they last made on their staff job, or some suitable percentage over that. (“I made $100K on staff. I bet I can make $125K freelancing.”) Or maybe they set their sights on some salary they heard about somewhere. (“I heard that Francesco Scavullo gets $25,000 for a one-day shoot.”)

It could also be an arbritrary number that seems ‘realistic’ or ‘fair’ for their line of work. (“Even the world’s best proofreader can’t earn more than $50K. It just can’t be done.”)

Or maybe you pick a number that matches what your peers earn. A figure that would make your parents proud. A number that would get you off the hook with your bookie or credit card company.

Sometimes it’s inborn since youth. There was a kid at my high school, known for his smooth ambition and endless hustle. He went on to make millions and make headlines. (Except the poor sap did it at Enron and got 10 years in prison for his trouble.)

Do you truly and earnestly want — ache – to make $100K a year? $300K?

Then you will. You will figure it out.  Those backroom boys in your brain will be working the issue a round the clock.

Do you want to make a million a year?  Just figure out how to generate about $20,000 per week. Or about $4,000 each work day. There are fashion models who earn that. John Grisham and Tom Clancy do that. (Probably several times over.) Actresses and directors make that kind of money. Self-employed people make huge piles of money all the time. But only because they truly WANT to do so, and believe they can.

So the simple answer is: if you’re content and happy and feel lucky to earn $50K a year, that’s pretty much what you’ll earn as a freelancer.

If you itch and burn to earn $150K, that’s what you’ll end up earning. Same for $472K or $1.58 M.

You will earn, to the penny, pretty much what you want to earn.

And you can quote me.